


Butterfly

by tokyofish



Category: Bleach
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-11-04
Updated: 2004-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-10 02:40:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2007912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokyofish/pseuds/tokyofish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever caught Kuchiki Rukia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Butterfly

**Author's Note:**

> Bleach is not mine.

No one ever caught Kuchiki Rukia. Not even Renji who tried the hardest and the longest. She flitted through all the nets and snares, in and out of men’s lives, a splash of shadow with wings.

There were times when she wondered if she remembered the face of true affection, the touch of real tenderness. Then she remembered the pain in feet callused from running through the dirty streets, the beast named hunger, the pinch of fear, the endless sounds of the dying and the destitute, and she laughed to herself. Affection? Tenderness? Since when had she made their acquaintance?

Clad in silken robes, she lay in a cold bed and thought of the life granted to her by the ones whose eyes were colorless and hard as diamonds, as beautiful and empty as glass. Surely, this was the better life.

So what if all the things she had once held dear to her were moving further and further away. She snatched at it. The echo of Renji’s laughter as he walked away, moving in circles too wide and too shallow for her feet to step within.

So what.

But here she was, dressed in flannel pajamas, warm beneath a layer of blankets, feeling slightly claustrophobic in a dark space barely large enough to fit her tiny frame.

“Good night,” came his muffled words through the wooden sliding door. She heard him switch off the light and adjusted her eyes to another layer of dark.

His breathing came slow and deep. She counted the seconds between each breath, her eyelids growing heavy, and felt warmth spreading up from her toes to suffuse her whole body.

_We’ll do more training tomorrow,_ she thought sleepily. _I don’t care if he whines. That idiot. It’s too dangerous. He needs to get better, faster . . . Dammit._ She felt herself melting into the pattern of his breathing. _Damn it. Since when . . . did . . . I . . ._

And then, as she slipped through the boundary of the waking and sleeping worlds, the quivering of unmoving translucent wings.

_Maybe I’ll stay a while._


End file.
